After the Bath

The name at the lower left, written in red, is not a signature. It is the stamp of the studio sale held after Degas's death, at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris in May 1918, six months before the Armistice. Until then this pastel had never left his studio. He made it around 1886, the year he showed a suite of bathing women at the last Impressionist exhibition, and it belongs to the same run of work. A woman bends forward to dry herself against a blue ground, all of it laid in with quick parallel strokes on cardboard. At the sale it went to Georges Viau, a dentist who collected the Impressionists, and it stayed in the Viau collection until an auction at the Hôtel Drouot in 1942, in occupied Paris. The Rome gallery bought it in 1962 from the Basel dealer Ernst Beyeler.